There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul. |
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too. |
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies. |
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. |
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself. |
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. |
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile. |
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. |
To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is. |
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life. |
To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves. |
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. |
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. |
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. |
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits -- and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful. |